Technical topics in the cybersecurity space

Author: Ben Gidley

Following on from previous posts (part 1, part 2) I wanted to drill down a bit more into the components from the container cluster node in the reference architecture as is shown on the image below. […]

In my previous post I advocated reducing the security perimeter to the smallest possible size – because perimeter based security is often not enough, the slightest ‘hole’ in the perimeter allows attackers to get in. […]

I recall in early 2000’s having a debate with a security expert about firewalls, at the time they were advocating the firewall model was fundamentally broken! Their argument was if any traffic could get through, in any direction, for any purpose, bad guys could figure out how to use it to exploit the system. I disagreed, believing the ‘new’ filtering technology would be able to stop them, I was wrong.

AVTest.org produced their annual malware report recently and it’s interesting reading. It charts of picture of an active battle between attackers trying to make money and defenders who are fighting to keep up. The headlines of the report show malware authors are moving away from just targeting Windows PC’s and intro Macs, Linux (often in iOT) and Android.

In May Tim Charman and Ben Gidley presented a talk at CodeMotion in Amsterdam showing how you can use obfuscation, whitebox and integrity verification to secure communications from the browser even in the case of […]

The recent ransomware attacks have focused lots of minds on cyber security, however many of the solutions being proposed are little more than sticking plasters to the larger underlying issue – namely systems are not secure by default. The ‘trend’ in software has been to launch it, then fix it. This is a very attractive proposition for businesses, as it lets them discover the ideas that work and don’t work, and then iteratively improve them. Most of the gadgets we use in our lives today would not exist without this mentality. However, the dark side of this approach is that almost all software is not secure. The evidence shows that pretty much every system deployed has security flaws. The only question is who finds the flaws first – bad people or good people.

We read continually about new buffer overflows in tools that allow ‘bad guys’ to take over various systems. This week the unfortunate program was Avast AV. The bit that always surprises me is these issues are still occurring in code written relatively recently, we’ve known how to fix all these issues for many years, yet people keep writing code that has these defects. I’d argue that the main cause of this is premature optimization and ignorance.